Transported from one temporal and spatial location to another, the dissolve—unlike the cut—emphasizes the improbable, in-between moment, and in the Blue Velvet frame at second #1645 we witness something impossible: two overlapping realities appearing at the same time. Cinema’s own form of quantum entanglement.

So here it is: Much of the plot setup and some of the dialogue in Martin Scorsese’s excellent 1985 film After Hours—a significant portion of the movie’s first 30 minutes, in fact—were brazenly lifted from “Lies,” a 1982NPR Playhouse monologue by Joe Frank, the great L.A.-based radio artist who’s gotten a lot of love here on Panopticist. Joe Frank never received official credit for his contributions, and he appears to have been paid a generous amount of money to settle the plagiarism suit and keep everything quiet. It’s possible that this scandal was reported in the film-industry trade press around the time of the film’s release, but neither Nexis nor Google reveal evidence of any media coverage. I learned of the similarities in 2004 or 2005 through chatter on the unofficial Joe Frank mailing list. The closest thing I’ve found to a reference in a traditional media outlet is in this March 2000 Joe Frank profile in Salon, which mentions that Frank was “paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film (which he won’t name) that plagiarized his dialogue.”

I have it on good authority that Amélie turned Montmartre into a "tourist shithole". The Café des 2 Moulins, the film's key location, was flooded with sightseers, and sold on. Someone put a banner over Rue Lepicreading "Welcome to the quartier of Amélie Poulain". Megaphones pumped out accordion music in the street, turning the area into some kind of Marcel Marceau wet dream. Amélie has that kind of effect. Watching it for the second time on the eve of its 10th-anniversary re-release, I still find Audrey Tautou's boulevard busybody simpering to the point of psychosis. (As our own Peter Bradshaw said of her flat-rearranging antics: "Does the director know that this is precisely what Charles Manson claimed to love doing?").

Oh, and lest you think that Fincher and Mara are totally doing it, the author of the profile (Jonathan Van Meter — it’s not insignificant that the author is a male) notes that Fincher’s partner has been a key component in the Mara to Lisbeth transformation.

[Rooney] also gets to reside, at least for now, in the family-like cocoon of Fincherworld. Everyone raves about Fincher’s secret weapon, his romantic partner (and producer for the past nineteen years), Ceán Chaffin. A cheerful, formidable presence, she seems to be handling the work of a dozen people, including acting as Mara’s publicist. “She’s incredible,” says Mara. “They are the best people to work with. They will tell you exactly how it is, even if they think you won’t like it. Everything is on the table.”

"Yours truly" [no, not the cinetrix] of the always amusing I SAW THAT is so not feeling In Time. See for yourselves:

Then there’s a bunch of car crashes…and JT goes into the fancypants town where you have to pay a year of your life just to cross the border, and he gets into a fancy casino and meets Pete Campbell from Mad Men at the poker table and bets all his time on one great hand and gets like 1,000 years and impresses everyone, but especially Amanda Seyfried who is like “Hmm this looks like a great way to get back at my dad, Pete Campbell, but then later I will probably legitimately come to love this amazing brave visionary Marxist revolutionary ninja black belt who also luckily looks like Justin Timberlake and probably frenches great, lets be HONEST ladies.”

...Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which also features a beautiful interstitial piece by Herrmann, little remarked upon. It's a little Middle Eastern motif done underneath the pre-dinner meeting scene between James Stewart, Doris Day and Daniel Gélin﻿ (as Louis Bernard). It carries with it an opiated, exoticized feeling, relaxed but, in its drawn strings, suffuse with a dark undercurrent of vague danger, just out of reach.

Ian Jack takes a look at and a listen to Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin:

Transported from one temporal and spatial location to another, the dissolve—unlike the cut—emphasizes the improbable, in-between moment, and in the Blue Velvet frame at second #1645 we witness something impossible: two overlapping realities appearing at the same time. Cinema’s own form of quantum entanglement.

So here it is: Much of the plot setup and some of the dialogue in Martin Scorsese’s excellent 1985 film After Hours—a significant portion of the movie’s first 30 minutes, in fact—were brazenly lifted from “Lies,” a 1982NPR Playhouse monologue by Joe Frank, the great L.A.-based radio artist who’s gotten a lot of love here on Panopticist. Joe Frank never received official credit for his contributions, and he appears to have been paid a generous amount of money to settle the plagiarism suit and keep everything quiet. It’s possible that this scandal was reported in the film-industry trade press around the time of the film’s release, but neither Nexis nor Google reveal evidence of any media coverage. I learned of the similarities in 2004 or 2005 through chatter on the unofficial Joe Frank mailing list. The closest thing I’ve found to a reference in a traditional media outlet is in this March 2000 Joe Frank profile in Salon, which mentions that Frank was “paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film (which he won’t name) that plagiarized his dialogue.”

I have it on good authority that Amélie turned Montmartre into a "tourist shithole". The Café des 2 Moulins, the film's key location, was flooded with sightseers, and sold on. Someone put a banner over Rue Lepicreading "Welcome to the quartier of Amélie Poulain". Megaphones pumped out accordion music in the street, turning the area into some kind of Marcel Marceau wet dream. Amélie has that kind of effect. Watching it for the second time on the eve of its 10th-anniversary re-release, I still find Audrey Tautou's boulevard busybody simpering to the point of psychosis. (As our own Peter Bradshaw said of her flat-rearranging antics: "Does the director know that this is precisely what Charles Manson claimed to love doing?").

Oh, and lest you think that Fincher and Mara are totally doing it, the author of the profile (Jonathan Van Meter — it’s not insignificant that the author is a male) notes that Fincher’s partner has been a key component in the Mara to Lisbeth transformation.

[Rooney] also gets to reside, at least for now, in the family-like cocoon of Fincherworld. Everyone raves about Fincher’s secret weapon, his romantic partner (and producer for the past nineteen years), Ceán Chaffin. A cheerful, formidable presence, she seems to be handling the work of a dozen people, including acting as Mara’s publicist. “She’s incredible,” says Mara. “They are the best people to work with. They will tell you exactly how it is, even if they think you won’t like it. Everything is on the table.”

"Yours truly" [no, not the cinetrix] of the always amusing I SAW THAT is so not feeling In Time. See for yourselves:

Then there’s a bunch of car crashes…and JT goes into the fancypants town where you have to pay a year of your life just to cross the border, and he gets into a fancy casino and meets Pete Campbell from Mad Men at the poker table and bets all his time on one great hand and gets like 1,000 years and impresses everyone, but especially Amanda Seyfried who is like “Hmm this looks like a great way to get back at my dad, Pete Campbell, but then later I will probably legitimately come to love this amazing brave visionary Marxist revolutionary ninja black belt who also luckily looks like Justin Timberlake and probably frenches great, lets be HONEST ladies.”

...Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which also features a beautiful interstitial piece by Herrmann, little remarked upon. It's a little Middle Eastern motif done underneath the pre-dinner meeting scene between James Stewart, Doris Day and Daniel Gélin﻿ (as Louis Bernard). It carries with it an opiated, exoticized feeling, relaxed but, in its drawn strings, suffuse with a dark undercurrent of vague danger, just out of reach.

Ian Jack takes a look at and a listen to Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin: